UNC’s ideal Mack Brown replacement can show his upside to Tar Heels in Week 10

At this point, it feels like the clock has struck midnight on Mack Brown's second stint as North Carolina head coach. Sure, the Tar Heels picked up a thorough road win at Virginia last Saturday, but all that victory did was get the team back to 4-4. With four games remaining on the season, the Heels are mired near the bottom of the ACC standings, and it feels like the best-case scenario is a 6-6 record and a December bowl bid.

Even more alarming is the lack of juice on the recruiting trail. Long one of Brown's calling cards, the Heels have fallen off dramatically over the last couple of years. UNC has just 11 players committed to its 2025 class, which currently ranks 16th — ahead of only Louisville — in the ACC. Combine all that with some downright worrying vibes, and you can understand why Tar Heel fans might be looking to make a change once the season ends.

But take heart, Heels. While your own team might merely be playing for a spot in the Pinstripe Bowl on Saturday against Florida State, the perfect replacement for Brown is set to put on a show in one of the biggest games of the year. He's Penn State offensive coordinator Andy Kotelnicki, and if you don't know his name already, you certainly will by the end of the weekend.

Andy Kotelnicki set to prove he's an ideal Mack Brown replacement at UNC

Kotelnicki might not have the resume you typically associate with the Carolina job. In a lot of ways, he's the opposite of Brown: a Midwest lifer who came up the hard way, succeeding with scheme rather than a firm handshake.

But while the resume seems modest, make no mistake: Wherever Kotelnicki's been, he's brought a diabolical offense with him. He got his big break back in 2013, when he landed on Lance Leipold's staff as the offensive coordinator at Wisconsin-Whitewater. By then, Leipold had turned UWW into a dynasty, and Kotelnicki helped keep things rolling, winning Division III national titles in both 2013 and 2014.

From there Kotelnicki followed Leipold to Buffalo, where he built one of the most devastating rushing attacks in the country. In 2019, running backs Jaret Patterson and Kevin Marks combined for 2,834 yards on the ground on 539 attempts (5.25 ypc) as the Bulls posted consecutive eight-win seasons for the first time ever in FBS. That success brought Leipold and Kotelnicki to Kansas, where they took one of the most moribund programs in the country and turned it into a legitimate Big 12 contender behind the dynamic backfield of QB Jalon Daniels and RB Devin Neal.

Kotelnicki finally left the nest last winter, taking Penn State's OC job. The improvement has been immediate and impressive: Five-star QB Drew Allar looks like a totally different player now than he did last season (174.6 passer rating so far this year compared to 136.9 in 2023), while Tyler Warren has blossomed into the best tight end in the country. A Group of 5 program, a bottom-tier Power 4 program, a Big 10 power; it hasn't mattered. At every stop, Kotelnicki has brought the goods, developing a reputation for shifts, motions, weird formations and general unpredictability that no one's been able to crack yet.

And on Saturday, Kotelnicki will look to pass his biggest test to date when Ohio State comes to Beaver Stadium. This is the sort of game James Franklin has yet to prove he can win, the sort of game he went out and got Kotelnicki for. If Kotelnicki's unit once again does the job, it'll leave no doubt about his bonafides as an offensive mind. It'll also tell North Carolina everything it needs to hear: Kotelnicki might not be a Southern guy, and he might not be known first and foremost as a recruiter. But the Heels have tried to turbocharge their development by hoovering up Charlotte five-stars, and look where that's gotten them. If you want to build a program, one that will maximize the players it gets, Kotelnicki is your guy, and he'll be on display for the whole country this weekend.